5 ms·

It's vogons dot org; it's a pretty wide range of folks with varied interest in obsolete hardware. Some of the louder voices there are absolutely insufferable.

It's vogons dot org; it's a pretty wide range of folks with varied interest in obsolete hardware. Some of the louder voices there are absolutely insufferable. There is genuine knowledge in the forum pages though, and if you're doing stuff for DOS/real-mode x86 there's a good chance you'll find yourself there.

munchler 2y ago
I did a quick search for references to mt32-pi on that forum and found nothing unpleasant. Maybe I'm missing something. https://www.vogons.org/search.php?st=0&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&keywords=mt32-pi https://www.vogons.org/search.php?st=0&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&ke...
- arvigeus 2y ago
  Speculation: maybe abusive comments were later removed by mods?
  - sleepybrett 2y ago
    https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1256822&hilit=mt32%20mt32pi%20mt32-pi%20pi%20clout#p1256822 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1256822&hilit=mt32%20... looks spicy but almost a year old, maybe the guy continued to harass.
  - csnover 2y ago
    Forum admin here. No posts were reported or removed and the author hasn’t posted since last April. I don’t know what’s going on here and have reached out to them to try to understand and assist. The community standards explicitly prohibit off-site harassment but unless someone tells us, there’s nothing I can do about it.
pino82 2y ago
At least they are something that actually exists on their own, and not just a Microsoft cloud entity. I've seen rough people everywhere on the internet, but that's at least very delighting.
tdeck 2y ago
> Some of the louder voices there are absolutely insufferable. This sounds like one of those situations where if you just warned and then banned certain people, the community would be much better off.
- csnover 2y ago
  This is exactly what happens on VOGONS, but it relies on the community reporting violations, and I suspect this isn’t happening consistently. I’ve reviewed too many reports where multiple people had been breaking the rules for days before anyone bothered to flag a single post. I don’t know what to do about how toxicity has become so normalised in online spaces that people don’t even bother to flag it. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to tell new members that VOGONS is not Reddit or Twitter and to not import antisocial behaviour from those places into this place. It is like fighting a losing battle with an invasive species. Frankly, I also don’t know how to strike the right balance when it comes to long-time members who break the rules infrequently but consistently. Knowing that a forum regular is probably going to break the rules again in the future, but not for several months, doesn’t make for an obvious solution to me. So I try to do the best I can to remind people to do better, and hope the time-until-relapse goes up. But I am sure this negatively impacts other community members since they will see the same person doing the same thing again and wonder why nothing is being done about them, not noticing that the last incident was three or six or twelve months ago.
  - zimpenfish 2y ago
    > Frankly, I also don’t know how to strike the right balance when it comes to long-time members who break the rules infrequently but consistently. Suspend them for a month the first time, ban them outright the second. Sounds like they're not interested in listening to reason. Also pour encourager les autres, etc.
    - csnover 2y ago
      Three-strikes-style rules like this make for easy decision-making, but they don’t make for good decision-making. They eliminate curiosity about the root problem, reject the reality of how humans learn (it is almost never linear), and usually end up backfiring catastrophically at some point. Compliance by fear does not make for open and healthy communities. The fundamental attribution error makes us believe the problem must be that this kind of person is “not interested in listening to reason”, but I can tell you that the ones who aren’t interested in listening make that abundantly clear when you ask them to stop. They are not the ones I struggle with. The problem cases are those who act in good faith but have trouble regulating their emotions, infrequently enough to not be an obvious menace, but consistently enough that I recognise their names.

munchler 2y ago

I did a quick search for references to mt32-pi on that forum and found nothing unpleasant. Maybe I'm missing something. https://www.vogons.org/search.php?st=0&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&keywords=mt32-pi https://www.vogons.org/search.php?st=0&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&ke...

arvigeus 2y ago
Speculation: maybe abusive comments were later removed by mods?
- sleepybrett 2y ago
  https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1256822&hilit=mt32%20mt32pi%20mt32-pi%20pi%20clout#p1256822 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1256822&hilit=mt32%20... looks spicy but almost a year old, maybe the guy continued to harass.
- csnover 2y ago
  Forum admin here. No posts were reported or removed and the author hasn’t posted since last April. I don’t know what’s going on here and have reached out to them to try to understand and assist. The community standards explicitly prohibit off-site harassment but unless someone tells us, there’s nothing I can do about it.

pino82 2y ago

At least they are something that actually exists on their own, and not just a Microsoft cloud entity. I've seen rough people everywhere on the internet, but that's at least very delighting.

tdeck 2y ago

> Some of the louder voices there are absolutely insufferable. This sounds like one of those situations where if you just warned and then banned certain people, the community would be much better off.

csnover 2y ago
This is exactly what happens on VOGONS, but it relies on the community reporting violations, and I suspect this isn’t happening consistently. I’ve reviewed too many reports where multiple people had been breaking the rules for days before anyone bothered to flag a single post. I don’t know what to do about how toxicity has become so normalised in online spaces that people don’t even bother to flag it. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to tell new members that VOGONS is not Reddit or Twitter and to not import antisocial behaviour from those places into this place. It is like fighting a losing battle with an invasive species. Frankly, I also don’t know how to strike the right balance when it comes to long-time members who break the rules infrequently but consistently. Knowing that a forum regular is probably going to break the rules again in the future, but not for several months, doesn’t make for an obvious solution to me. So I try to do the best I can to remind people to do better, and hope the time-until-relapse goes up. But I am sure this negatively impacts other community members since they will see the same person doing the same thing again and wonder why nothing is being done about them, not noticing that the last incident was three or six or twelve months ago.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > Frankly, I also don’t know how to strike the right balance when it comes to long-time members who break the rules infrequently but consistently. Suspend them for a month the first time, ban them outright the second. Sounds like they're not interested in listening to reason. Also pour encourager les autres, etc.
  - csnover 2y ago
    Three-strikes-style rules like this make for easy decision-making, but they don’t make for good decision-making. They eliminate curiosity about the root problem, reject the reality of how humans learn (it is almost never linear), and usually end up backfiring catastrophically at some point. Compliance by fear does not make for open and healthy communities. The fundamental attribution error makes us believe the problem must be that this kind of person is “not interested in listening to reason”, but I can tell you that the ones who aren’t interested in listening make that abundantly clear when you ask them to stop. They are not the ones I struggle with. The problem cases are those who act in good faith but have trouble regulating their emotions, infrequently enough to not be an obvious menace, but consistently enough that I recognise their names.